The latest twist in this ancient and hopeless struggle is hard to address without equal measure of distaste for Hamas’s religious barbarism and dismay at Israel’s apparent determination to commit slow suicide. Gershom Gorenberg captures the agony as well as anyone I’ve read:
Israelis don’t see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month “calm.” Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the “calm” were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions. When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force.
To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail – especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in. So brinkmanship led to both sides rushing over the brink into the abyss. Olmert, Livni, Barak and the collected generals apparently think that Hamas will agree to reduce violence as a result of the onslaught. A ten-second exercise in trying to imagine how Hamas leaders – or Gaza residents – see the situation leads to the opposite conclusion.
It is possible that the new offensive will shatter the Hamas government. In that case we’ll have a collapsed state in Gaza, where there is absolutely no one interested in stopping rocket fire. Will Israel occupy the Strip again then? Does our triumvurate think that NATO will want the job? Outside of showing that we have a bigger hammer, what will the operation accomplish?
Outside of the hammer, actually, Hamas did have some delicate tools in its tool chest. It could, for instance, have proposed indirect negotiations aimed at a two-state solution.That would have caught Israel’s leaders totally off guard, and undermined the political rationale for the siege. I guess that no one in the Gaza leadership considered this for 10 seconds.
(Photo: Palestinian mourners carry the body of Haya Hamdan during her funeral in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on December 30, 2008. A fresh Israeli air strike on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip today killed Haya and her sister Lama, aged four and 11, Palestinian medical sources said. Lama and Haya Hamdan were killed in a raid targeting a donkey cart in Beit Hanun, the sources said. Warplanes pounded Gaza for a fourth day as the Palestinian death toll rose to at least 360. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty.)
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